The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Collaboration between multiple parties often requires that the parties share various items of information, such as documents, tables, spreadsheets, graphs, and charts. When sharing these items of information, the parties and/or the information sharing mechanisms relied upon by those parties often reference certain objects by name. For example, the parties may need to exchange a document that analyzes the performance of a certain financial instrument. The document may refer to the financial instrument by a name, such as “ALPHAlpha.”
In some situations, a referenced name may not have the same meaning to all parties involved in the communication. For example, a first party may know a particular financial instrument by the name “ALPHAlpha,” while a second party may know the particular financial instrument by the name “109328.” When the first party attempts to communicate information that involves a financial instrument named “ALPHAlpha” to the second party, because the second party knows that financial instrument by the name “109328,” the second party will be unable to determine the financial instrument to which the first party is referring.
In fact, in some cases the second party may associate the name “ALPHAlpha” with a different object than the particular financial instrument. Since the second party will believe that the first party is communicating information that involves a different object than was intended, the second party may entirely misunderstand the information communicated by the first party. Moreover, since the first party cannot be certain that the first party's version of “ALPHAlpha” is associated with the same data as the second party's version of “ALPHAlpha,” the first party may hesitate to share any information at all, lest the second party be misled as to the meaning of the information.
In some cases, the second party in the above information exchange scenario may lack access to data for a financial instrument that exactly corresponds to the particular financial instrument, but may still have access to an object labeled “ALPH” whose data is close enough to the exchanged information so as to render the object an effective substitute for the particular financial instrument. If the second party were capable of recognizing that an object to which it has access could serve as a substitute for the financial instrument, the second party would be able to understand the information that the first party wishes to share. However, again because of the differences in nomenclature, the second party will be unable to identify the object as a substitute for the financial instrument referenced by the first party.
The inability of a party to correctly identify an object or a substitute for an object referenced by another party can severely cripple an exchange of information. For example, in many cases, parties share items of information that include metadata in place of actual data. This metadata may include the name of one or more objects associated with the actual data, and by which the actual data may be located. The actual data utilized in a document is therefore retrieved dynamically based on the metadata.
Sharing metadata instead of actual data is particularly common when each party may rely upon a separate data source. For example, sharing metadata instead of actual data may be desirable for security or efficiency purposes, in that the parties may be unwilling or unable to transmit actual data. Or, sharing metadata instead of actual data may be useful for the purposes of ensuring that a shared document or graph is always populated with the most recent data available to a party.
However, because each party is relying on a separate data source, there is no way to guarantee that the parties name various objects in a consistent fashion. Nor is there any guarantee that the parties have access to the same type of data. For example, one party may subscribe to data from Bloomberg, while another party may subscribe to data from Reuters. These potential differences between data sources complicate any exchange of documents that rely upon metadata instead of actual data. For example, if a second party is unable to rely upon metadata in a document shared by a first party to correctly identify an object in the second party's data repository that corresponds to an object that the first party intended to reference, the second party will be unable to understand the information conveyed in that document.